The third and final book in the "Why do they hate us?" trilogy, the Politics of Resentment joins Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in their Own Land as explorations of the Trump voter's sociology. Whereas the latter two look at Kentucky/Ohio and Louisiana, Resentment looks at Wisconsin. I read it with a very particular question: why did the Blue Wall fail?
Two big ideas stand out to me, the first is the main theme that Cramer has: rural consciousness is a valuable, important thing. People who don't live in cities are aware of that fact immensely, and they see it in a multitude of ways. 1. They see cities as being less hardworking, as they do less physical labor. 2. They see cities as being bastions of government employees. 3. They see cities as being overpaid and less deserving. 4. They (tacitly) see cities as less white. 5. They see cities as less "cohesive" or community-centered (neighbors do not know each other).
These five ways of seeing cities (and the five inverse ways of seeing themselves) interlock and feedback on one another. They bind together to create what I would call an "adjacent class"- a class of people who are every bit struggling as the poor in cities and facing the same enemies, but because of Place see themselves as moral opposites.
What you notice when you read Vance and Hochschild (and now Cramer) is that the would-be Trump voters have a split-relationship with "The State". They live in a way that they both desperately need help from the state, but at the same time are condemned and oppressed by it. Vance describes how the child protection services that ought to protect him bred fear and distrust in his family. Hoschschild describes poor chemical plant workers who, on one hand, need the government to step in and protect their environment, but by doing so would destroy some of those jobs that they hope to enjoy. Cramer describes a similar paradox: the rural people of Wisconsin need the Department of Natural Resources to protect the game and fish from overexploitation, but they themselves resist its protection and chafe under things like licensing and fees. At the same time, both the Wisconsinian and Louisianian states allow large corporations to get away scot free.
Who else deals with a state that is at once absent and oppressive? Who else deals with a state that both fails to enforce and uses too much force? The black American. #BlackLivesMatter is a movement with an easily explainable, readily apparent problem. Anybody who is compassionate, sane and statistically literate knows that there is something wrong, something dystopian that needs to be fixed.
But the problems outlined in the "Why do they hate us?" trilogy are subtle. They're not microaggressions aggregating over somebody's lifetime, they're nanoaggressions aggregating over an entire town, an entire region's lifetime. Ultimately, what I think they come down to is a failure in governance:
There are well-governed, and unwell-governed, parts of the country. In the US, when I go to the suburbs or the gentrified areas of New York or DC, I am fairly close to well-governed areas. The cops are quick, the firefighters are a few moments away. The worse part of my interactions with the government is usually the DMV. The best parts of my interactions with the government are when I go to the national Disneyland that is our national parks.
The farther you get away from economic centers the less resources are that marshalled for you. When you have a history of racist oppression, black neighborhoods are first to be ignored- but so are regions that have simply always been poor, or, worse, getting poorer. The capacity of the state begins to weaken in those regions, breeding resentment. Those economic centers -the segregated suburbs- can thereby use this resentment. They can elect anti-redistributive leaders who stop the outflow of resources to the poorer regions even more and create private enclaves like those described by Naomi Klein in the Shock Doctrine. These anti-redistributive leaders thereby make the poor complicit in their own destruction.
So, why did the Blue Wall fail? The failure of Democrats within states, and the failure of national Democrats and the federal government to deter the rusting of the Rust Belt seems to be the primary reason. The rusting itself creates a feedback effect where local governments fail to govern, and then states fail to govern, and then those who /promise/ they will not govern, themselves begin to govern and increase the rate of failure. The federal government, state government, and civic society are, throughout this process, more and more of a target of resentment.
And then a city-dweller... a lawyer... an old, frail lady... ignores you completely, exactly as you expected.
Tuesday, December 20, 2016
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Review: Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
How did Trump get elected? That's the question I've been trying to answer with the books I've been absorbing since the election. Hillbilly Elegy was a man's memoirs through Kentucky and Ohio. Vance described broken families held together by poverty and honor culture. He blames the problems of the white poor on themselves.
But what about the Tea Party? What about the South? They've voted Republican since the Southern strategy. The South was not broken by a China shock or engineers putting them out of work. Hochschild attempts to that answer for these people by "climbing the wall" and she does that through the keyhole issue of environmentalism and the keyhole state of Louisiana.
You see, Louisiana is a state that reflects the South: it is the most poorly educated, most impoverished, and laughably pro-business state, just as the South is an impoverished, poorly educated and pro-business region. It also has horrible environmental catastrophes happen on a regular basis. For much of the Gulf coast the Deep Horizon disaster was a new event, but, for the Pelican State, it was just another collapse.
The Tea Party is anti-government, that is a given. Yet, as Hochschild gets her Louisianan confessors to pronounce, it's the corporations that continually screw them again and again. It is the chemical companies that dispose their waste in the bayous and kill all the animals. It is the oil company that creates giant sinkholes. The waste management corporation is the one that gives an entire community cancer.
The answer Hochschild gets is that Louisiana, the South, and the Right in general, has a "Deep Story". The story can be summed up in a sentence: the government is helping people of color, women, and corporations a boost in the line of the "American dream". All the problematic beliefs of conservatives are connected to this narrative.
Honestly, the book is amazing because it tests your patience, but not Hochschild's. Every time a person speaks, you want to throttle them with facts and figures. You want to declare, "That isn't how the universe operates!" and yet you can't. Your left to feel sorry that their entire family has been killed by a company upstream dropping toxic waste, or to pity the mayor doing everything to employ his people by the company that will be importing the workers they actually need.
No, you can't reason with the words Arlie is capturing. You are forced by every encounter to realize that these people have a different worldview in ways that defy what us in our bubble normally consider. They don't just think the world is 4000 years old, they feel it. They don't just think that Obama was suspicious, they feel it. They value obedience and discipline, not creativity or spontaneity or intelligence. Whereas my friends in Boston value the pursuit of truth, my friends in New York value the pursuit of art, and my friends in Washington value the pursuit of compromise and nuance, those in the chapels value bowed heads, those in the heartland value compliance, and those in the fields value inexplorable honor.
Those of my friends who claim "this is an issue of economic anxiety" or "it is race, stupid" are missing the bigger picture: the separation is ultimately a fundamental separation of values.
But what about the Tea Party? What about the South? They've voted Republican since the Southern strategy. The South was not broken by a China shock or engineers putting them out of work. Hochschild attempts to that answer for these people by "climbing the wall" and she does that through the keyhole issue of environmentalism and the keyhole state of Louisiana.
You see, Louisiana is a state that reflects the South: it is the most poorly educated, most impoverished, and laughably pro-business state, just as the South is an impoverished, poorly educated and pro-business region. It also has horrible environmental catastrophes happen on a regular basis. For much of the Gulf coast the Deep Horizon disaster was a new event, but, for the Pelican State, it was just another collapse.
The Tea Party is anti-government, that is a given. Yet, as Hochschild gets her Louisianan confessors to pronounce, it's the corporations that continually screw them again and again. It is the chemical companies that dispose their waste in the bayous and kill all the animals. It is the oil company that creates giant sinkholes. The waste management corporation is the one that gives an entire community cancer.
The answer Hochschild gets is that Louisiana, the South, and the Right in general, has a "Deep Story". The story can be summed up in a sentence: the government is helping people of color, women, and corporations a boost in the line of the "American dream". All the problematic beliefs of conservatives are connected to this narrative.
Honestly, the book is amazing because it tests your patience, but not Hochschild's. Every time a person speaks, you want to throttle them with facts and figures. You want to declare, "That isn't how the universe operates!" and yet you can't. Your left to feel sorry that their entire family has been killed by a company upstream dropping toxic waste, or to pity the mayor doing everything to employ his people by the company that will be importing the workers they actually need.
No, you can't reason with the words Arlie is capturing. You are forced by every encounter to realize that these people have a different worldview in ways that defy what us in our bubble normally consider. They don't just think the world is 4000 years old, they feel it. They don't just think that Obama was suspicious, they feel it. They value obedience and discipline, not creativity or spontaneity or intelligence. Whereas my friends in Boston value the pursuit of truth, my friends in New York value the pursuit of art, and my friends in Washington value the pursuit of compromise and nuance, those in the chapels value bowed heads, those in the heartland value compliance, and those in the fields value inexplorable honor.
Those of my friends who claim "this is an issue of economic anxiety" or "it is race, stupid" are missing the bigger picture: the separation is ultimately a fundamental separation of values.
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
Review: Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
Why did Trump win Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania? Something has been going wrong in America. You have to ignore those macrostatistics that describe the Megalopolis or San Fransisco and Seattle. "Median wages in the United States has been increasing all of Obama's term" is a claim that ignores geographic realities:
Post-War America really was greater for the families of the midwest: Vance traces his family lineage starting with his grandparents taking the Hillbilly Highway to the modern day, drug-laced disaster zone that is middle America. The culture shock of "Honor Culture" moving to the bigger cities avalanche and devolve when hit by economic shocks of stagflation and "rusting." The result is the story of Vance's life: a boy in a broken family who through luck and love makes his way to Yale Law school.
This book will make you cry and laugh. I'm not kidding- I started laughing on the metro one morning, and started tearing up the next. Vance lets us into his life and community in a pretty powerful way. If you want to know why Trump won and the Democratic party is in retreat, this book is the answer.
Post-War America really was greater for the families of the midwest: Vance traces his family lineage starting with his grandparents taking the Hillbilly Highway to the modern day, drug-laced disaster zone that is middle America. The culture shock of "Honor Culture" moving to the bigger cities avalanche and devolve when hit by economic shocks of stagflation and "rusting." The result is the story of Vance's life: a boy in a broken family who through luck and love makes his way to Yale Law school.
This book will make you cry and laugh. I'm not kidding- I started laughing on the metro one morning, and started tearing up the next. Vance lets us into his life and community in a pretty powerful way. If you want to know why Trump won and the Democratic party is in retreat, this book is the answer.
Thursday, October 27, 2016
Review: Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
Thaler's Misbehaving is a good history of the "Behavioral Economics", and it goes over some of the main ideas of behavior economics. However, it is apparent that it never really unifies together. It is a "module" that rides atop standard economic theory. It is a list of phenomena that trace themselves to basic human psychology, but end up costing society billions of dollars.
The closest it seems behavioral economics has ever gotten to giving us an answer to how to govern our society's is through libertarian paternalism. But what it really does is destroy the right-wing notions that the economy is a perfectly smart distributor of goods and services. Instead it is made out of humans, and humans are dumb.
I recommend this if you want a overview of the history of behavioral economics and how it fits with regular economics, but I think you ought to read Nudge by Thaler if you want any of the guidance it contains.
The closest it seems behavioral economics has ever gotten to giving us an answer to how to govern our society's is through libertarian paternalism. But what it really does is destroy the right-wing notions that the economy is a perfectly smart distributor of goods and services. Instead it is made out of humans, and humans are dumb.
I recommend this if you want a overview of the history of behavioral economics and how it fits with regular economics, but I think you ought to read Nudge by Thaler if you want any of the guidance it contains.
Thursday, October 13, 2016
Review: Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
Algorithms to Live by is a self-help book disguising itself as a pop-psychology book but it is ACTUALLY a pop-computer science book. This misunderstanding comes from the title: "The Computer Science of Human Decisions" sounds like regular cognitive psyche 101, but that's not what the book is actually about. Instead, it is "human decisions which ought to be corrected by computer science." That is a big change, and it turns the book into something very interesting.
Computers and computer science are a very interesting field that sits at the combination of physics, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology. I don't think it is possible to be good at it without having a moderate understanding of those fields (and I believe that the interview questions posed during tech interviews are indicative of this being true). Algorithms to Live By makes this combination very clear. The structure of the book is repeated in a powerful (algorithmic!?) way: Explain a human problem, explain how a computer/math algorithm might answer that problem, complicate that problem to explore the literature on that problem, and then explain how well humans do at it naturally. For example, the Multiarmed Bandit problem, or the Explore-Exploit Dilemma is used to shed light on the phenomena that old people have few friends, but they are very, very close.
In fact, I would read this book just for the chapter on the Explore-Exploit Dilemma, just because I think its critical to thinking about life and how one ought to live.
Computers and computer science are a very interesting field that sits at the combination of physics, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology. I don't think it is possible to be good at it without having a moderate understanding of those fields (and I believe that the interview questions posed during tech interviews are indicative of this being true). Algorithms to Live By makes this combination very clear. The structure of the book is repeated in a powerful (algorithmic!?) way: Explain a human problem, explain how a computer/math algorithm might answer that problem, complicate that problem to explore the literature on that problem, and then explain how well humans do at it naturally. For example, the Multiarmed Bandit problem, or the Explore-Exploit Dilemma is used to shed light on the phenomena that old people have few friends, but they are very, very close.
In fact, I would read this book just for the chapter on the Explore-Exploit Dilemma, just because I think its critical to thinking about life and how one ought to live.
Thursday, October 6, 2016
Review: The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
The Drunkward's Walk is a good pop-statistics book. Unlike, say, Nate Silver's Signal/Noise book, this is actually popular statistics at its root. This would be a good reader for an AP statistics class. He explains things like probability, the origin of the normal curve (among others) and generally combines narrative, explanation, and good hypotheticals to take us from the Greek idealism of geometric shapes to the chaotic world we live in (where hurricanes are predicted using multifaceted models that are, in general, random).
He also (and this was boring for me, but probably super useful for everyone else) dips his foot in the well that is Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow." At least one chapter is based in the "look how stupid humans are" category of writing, which is really what we need every once in a while.
This is a good refresher and it tells you about the history of some of the most important ideas we have. For example, the concept of "Expected Value" was invented by Blaise Pascal. The idea essentially killed him, as it brought into existence (and was brought into existence by) Pascal's Wager, which turned his sinner's life into one of apparent piety that caused him to wither away.
He also (and this was boring for me, but probably super useful for everyone else) dips his foot in the well that is Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking, Fast and Slow." At least one chapter is based in the "look how stupid humans are" category of writing, which is really what we need every once in a while.
This is a good refresher and it tells you about the history of some of the most important ideas we have. For example, the concept of "Expected Value" was invented by Blaise Pascal. The idea essentially killed him, as it brought into existence (and was brought into existence by) Pascal's Wager, which turned his sinner's life into one of apparent piety that caused him to wither away.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Review: Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
We've all seen the Big Data books: the future is now! A/B testing forever! AlphaGo crushed it! OkCupid says you shouldn't have a shirtless fish pic, you adorably dull redneck!
But Big Data has a darkside, and O'Neil goes through each segment of our life to show how these "models" can be used against us, to extract goods from us, and to keep us poor. Unfortunately, she also loses her argumentative power that could come with nuance, and she has to disregard nuance in order to make it understandable to the layperson (in other words, I don't think she's very charitable to the layperson).
The first big issue she brings up and has lots of evidence for is: Transparency. Lots of Big Data models that we use (and are fed into) on a daily basis, are not transparent. They're opaque equations sitting on a server farm. A teacher being graded on a value added model doesn't know where their score is coming from. A potential hire doesn't know why he failed his psyche evaluation. A criminal standing before judge doesn't know why the score said he'd be more like to return to jail.
This is honestly one of my biggest takeaways, and it hits close to home. When you apply for a credit card, they tell you why you failed to get one. You can access your "data point" and know why you have the FICO score you do. Google and Facebook tell you the metrics they use to serve you ads in their settings. I know that Amazon is trying to get me to buy another wallet even though I just bought a wallet because they showed me five hundred ads for another wallet. But what about those ads that Forbes tries to serve me? The cookies sitting on my computer watching me? I have no ideas what they're doing and not readily known way to find out. What about non-regulated credit systems that exist out there in Web 2.0 land? Bank of America controls for race and tries to stop redlining when they make a new policy, but will Peter Thiel try to do that when he invests in E-Corp? Probably not.
The second big problem with some Big Data systems is that they create feedback loops that increase inequality. Here, O'Neil is super weak except when she brings up the criminal justice example- we could be using big data to help keep people out of prison and make programs that lower recidivism, but instead we're using it as a way to keep white people out of prison.... but am I really supposed to believe that ads help make poor people poorer? She brings up for-profit schools using targeted ads to lure immigrants and poor people into massive student debt to make a profit, and, while I admit that's super shady, it's not the targeted ads' fault, is it?
The third problem with these "Weapons of Math destruction" is that they often have skewed data. This is the old line "garbage in, garbage out" except now it's "racist/sexist garbage in, racist/sexist garbage out." For example, if you make a employment system that filters out resumes, than teach it on a bunch of older resumes, you're inputting the bias of those older resumes. So if the guy that was reading those resumes was racist, you might be teaching a racist model.
Technically O'Neil has two other "bad points" about "WMDs" but they're just about scale.
Now, there are a lot of problems in this book and O'Neil kind of goes on tangents. For one thing, the WMDs she brings up are less "weapons" than they are symptoms of a bigger societal problem. Take "democracy": our current political system allows a few people- those that live in Orlando, Florida and Pennsylvania, basically- to chose who will be the President. This is messed up, but it means that the Democratic Party could build a powerful machine learning system that most efficiently spent money in locations to help change hearts and minds and win. She really dislikes this Big Data system, and says it's a threat to democracy...
... but the electoral system itself is giant problem and threat to democracy (see: election of 2000)! Big Data has nothing to do with it!
The book ought to have been longer, and it ought to have included more counterexamples of positive data models (I can recall only two, FICO and some housing model). I think that she should've, if not had hand written equations or step-by-step instructions, at least given some background on actual data science. The way it is written makes it seem like she's a magician-mathematician that wandered down from the Ivory tower and realized that bankers were using magic for evil and now she wants to raise hell.
But I guess if I wanted authors to stop writing popular non-fiction books that they A/B tested on their blogs and turned into TED talks, I should stop reading popular non-fiction.
But Big Data has a darkside, and O'Neil goes through each segment of our life to show how these "models" can be used against us, to extract goods from us, and to keep us poor. Unfortunately, she also loses her argumentative power that could come with nuance, and she has to disregard nuance in order to make it understandable to the layperson (in other words, I don't think she's very charitable to the layperson).
The first big issue she brings up and has lots of evidence for is: Transparency. Lots of Big Data models that we use (and are fed into) on a daily basis, are not transparent. They're opaque equations sitting on a server farm. A teacher being graded on a value added model doesn't know where their score is coming from. A potential hire doesn't know why he failed his psyche evaluation. A criminal standing before judge doesn't know why the score said he'd be more like to return to jail.
This is honestly one of my biggest takeaways, and it hits close to home. When you apply for a credit card, they tell you why you failed to get one. You can access your "data point" and know why you have the FICO score you do. Google and Facebook tell you the metrics they use to serve you ads in their settings. I know that Amazon is trying to get me to buy another wallet even though I just bought a wallet because they showed me five hundred ads for another wallet. But what about those ads that Forbes tries to serve me? The cookies sitting on my computer watching me? I have no ideas what they're doing and not readily known way to find out. What about non-regulated credit systems that exist out there in Web 2.0 land? Bank of America controls for race and tries to stop redlining when they make a new policy, but will Peter Thiel try to do that when he invests in E-Corp? Probably not.
The second big problem with some Big Data systems is that they create feedback loops that increase inequality. Here, O'Neil is super weak except when she brings up the criminal justice example- we could be using big data to help keep people out of prison and make programs that lower recidivism, but instead we're using it as a way to keep white people out of prison.... but am I really supposed to believe that ads help make poor people poorer? She brings up for-profit schools using targeted ads to lure immigrants and poor people into massive student debt to make a profit, and, while I admit that's super shady, it's not the targeted ads' fault, is it?
The third problem with these "Weapons of Math destruction" is that they often have skewed data. This is the old line "garbage in, garbage out" except now it's "racist/sexist garbage in, racist/sexist garbage out." For example, if you make a employment system that filters out resumes, than teach it on a bunch of older resumes, you're inputting the bias of those older resumes. So if the guy that was reading those resumes was racist, you might be teaching a racist model.
Technically O'Neil has two other "bad points" about "WMDs" but they're just about scale.
Now, there are a lot of problems in this book and O'Neil kind of goes on tangents. For one thing, the WMDs she brings up are less "weapons" than they are symptoms of a bigger societal problem. Take "democracy": our current political system allows a few people- those that live in Orlando, Florida and Pennsylvania, basically- to chose who will be the President. This is messed up, but it means that the Democratic Party could build a powerful machine learning system that most efficiently spent money in locations to help change hearts and minds and win. She really dislikes this Big Data system, and says it's a threat to democracy...
... but the electoral system itself is giant problem and threat to democracy (see: election of 2000)! Big Data has nothing to do with it!
The book ought to have been longer, and it ought to have included more counterexamples of positive data models (I can recall only two, FICO and some housing model). I think that she should've, if not had hand written equations or step-by-step instructions, at least given some background on actual data science. The way it is written makes it seem like she's a magician-mathematician that wandered down from the Ivory tower and realized that bankers were using magic for evil and now she wants to raise hell.
But I guess if I wanted authors to stop writing popular non-fiction books that they A/B tested on their blogs and turned into TED talks, I should stop reading popular non-fiction.
Friday, September 9, 2016
Review: This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate
Estimates of the number of tons of carbon that we can safely burn before we have to stop range from 250 gigtons of Carbon to 500 gigatons of carbon (the conservative answer that Klein quotes). The number of gigatons that we know about. The number of gigatons that we as a civilization have the power to burn in our lifetime? 2,000 gigatons.
Those are the kind of numbers that Klein brings up in the first half of This Changes Everything. These are terrifying numbers. They are inexorable numbers. We all know that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth many times over... but we don't use nukes. We have enough carbon to destroy a hundred thousand ecosystems many (4-8) times overs.... and we're using them. We're increasing our use of them.
Klein points out that there is a time window- approximately ten years from 2017- that we have to dramatically curb our carbon pollution. To do this would require putting wind and solar up en masse and shutting down fossil fuel systems at the same time. She rightly points out that there is no "magic" technology. The nuclear systems that I love as much as the next engineer, simply can't be made as quickly and safely as we'll need them. She estimates that in the West we'd have to cut back our "consumption" to the same levels as in the 70s.
lol.
Another big takeaway: our carbon footprint in America and Europe cannot be counted by looking at just the carbon spewed out to power our air conditioners or released from our cars. It includes the Chinese soot that is used to make our goods, but ends up killing the elderly or young. That carbon energy is ultimately used to make Walmart competitive.
How are we to face this tidal wave of carbon and heat? Not geoengineering. If we realize too late that the islands are sinking and that the crops are on fire and the poor are dying of thirst, then we can't "geoengineer" because the results of that will be people dying of hunger! Not cap and trade or market systems- the European system doesn't work! Not carbon sequestration- it's literally impossible and anybody that thinks it would scale is an idiot.
No. How are we to face this tidal wave of carbon and heat? Cowboys and Indians... oh, and Hippies. That's Klein's answer to the climate crisis. The cowboys and Indians will unite the rural lands where pipes carry poison and the ground is broken, and they'll repel the capitalist scum while city-hippies will make urban-farms and begin shopping local. Oh, and divestment caused the gas bust.
If I sound a little irreverent it is because it is patently absurd. She herself has given us the task: reduce potential missions by 400%. If you think that bottom-up populism is going do that... well, maybe you've been hanging around too many tar sands. You need massive carbon taxes, massive subsidizes for fuels. You need the kind of direction and purpose that historically only a Democratic President and Congress have ever delivered for the American people.
And that's not happening. That's really the kicker. Klein, being Canadian (and worst, a Western Canadian) couldn't have predicted the rise of populist racism in the United States and Europe. She's too far removed from it. But here we are, on the edge of 2017, when "the Energy Agency (IEA) warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy will “lock-in” extremely dangerous warming" and the primary issue of the day is the fact that America is split between the racists and the not-racists. Oh, and "the youth aren't excited" about the not-racist candidate.
Despite what the reviews in the New York Times will tell you, this is not an optimistic book, and you shouldn't be optimistic.
Those are the kind of numbers that Klein brings up in the first half of This Changes Everything. These are terrifying numbers. They are inexorable numbers. We all know that we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the earth many times over... but we don't use nukes. We have enough carbon to destroy a hundred thousand ecosystems many (4-8) times overs.... and we're using them. We're increasing our use of them.
Klein points out that there is a time window- approximately ten years from 2017- that we have to dramatically curb our carbon pollution. To do this would require putting wind and solar up en masse and shutting down fossil fuel systems at the same time. She rightly points out that there is no "magic" technology. The nuclear systems that I love as much as the next engineer, simply can't be made as quickly and safely as we'll need them. She estimates that in the West we'd have to cut back our "consumption" to the same levels as in the 70s.
lol.
Another big takeaway: our carbon footprint in America and Europe cannot be counted by looking at just the carbon spewed out to power our air conditioners or released from our cars. It includes the Chinese soot that is used to make our goods, but ends up killing the elderly or young. That carbon energy is ultimately used to make Walmart competitive.
How are we to face this tidal wave of carbon and heat? Not geoengineering. If we realize too late that the islands are sinking and that the crops are on fire and the poor are dying of thirst, then we can't "geoengineer" because the results of that will be people dying of hunger! Not cap and trade or market systems- the European system doesn't work! Not carbon sequestration- it's literally impossible and anybody that thinks it would scale is an idiot.
No. How are we to face this tidal wave of carbon and heat? Cowboys and Indians... oh, and Hippies. That's Klein's answer to the climate crisis. The cowboys and Indians will unite the rural lands where pipes carry poison and the ground is broken, and they'll repel the capitalist scum while city-hippies will make urban-farms and begin shopping local. Oh, and divestment caused the gas bust.
If I sound a little irreverent it is because it is patently absurd. She herself has given us the task: reduce potential missions by 400%. If you think that bottom-up populism is going do that... well, maybe you've been hanging around too many tar sands. You need massive carbon taxes, massive subsidizes for fuels. You need the kind of direction and purpose that historically only a Democratic President and Congress have ever delivered for the American people.
And that's not happening. That's really the kicker. Klein, being Canadian (and worst, a Western Canadian) couldn't have predicted the rise of populist racism in the United States and Europe. She's too far removed from it. But here we are, on the edge of 2017, when "the Energy Agency (IEA) warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy will “lock-in” extremely dangerous warming" and the primary issue of the day is the fact that America is split between the racists and the not-racists. Oh, and "the youth aren't excited" about the not-racist candidate.
Despite what the reviews in the New York Times will tell you, this is not an optimistic book, and you shouldn't be optimistic.
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Review: The 4 Percent Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality
The 4 Percent Universe is classic PBS-bait. I mean that as a good thing: it is the story of the High-Z Supernova Search Team that competed against the Supernova Cosmology Project in order to determine the answer to the question: What is the ultimate fate of the universe?
Panek brings his own philosophy of science to the book: experiments are necessary to prove things. He isn't going to throw around theory like Kaku or Krauss or Greene. He has no desire to explain to us the latest permutation of quantum gibberish being thrown around in theoretical departments. He wants to give us the chronology from Newton to where we are now, and he does a wonderful job. Experiment by experiment he conveys to us the chronology of cosmology up to the present state:a universe that has an accelerating expansion drive by dark energy, and giant filament structures of galaxies bound by dark matter halos.
My favorite part of the book was about the trials and tribulations of Vera Rubin, a lady born around the time my grandmother who nailed down the evidence that made dark matter an indisputable fact of reality. She continually gets crap in the male dominated field of astronomy, but never gave up her interest in understanding the universe.
I would call this book "a romp." If you've been missing the NOVA of 2008, when Brian Greene helped start the cascade of science documentaries that would end up in the Cosmos flop and YouTube taking over as physics-knowledge-distributor, this book is for you.
Panek brings his own philosophy of science to the book: experiments are necessary to prove things. He isn't going to throw around theory like Kaku or Krauss or Greene. He has no desire to explain to us the latest permutation of quantum gibberish being thrown around in theoretical departments. He wants to give us the chronology from Newton to where we are now, and he does a wonderful job. Experiment by experiment he conveys to us the chronology of cosmology up to the present state:a universe that has an accelerating expansion drive by dark energy, and giant filament structures of galaxies bound by dark matter halos.
My favorite part of the book was about the trials and tribulations of Vera Rubin, a lady born around the time my grandmother who nailed down the evidence that made dark matter an indisputable fact of reality. She continually gets crap in the male dominated field of astronomy, but never gave up her interest in understanding the universe.
I would call this book "a romp." If you've been missing the NOVA of 2008, when Brian Greene helped start the cascade of science documentaries that would end up in the Cosmos flop and YouTube taking over as physics-knowledge-distributor, this book is for you.
Tuesday, August 9, 2016
Review: The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
| "I didn't sign up for a book about torture, but that's what I got" was my annoyed update when I was done with Naomi telling the story of the CIA's 1950's torture research spearheaded by Donald Ewen Cameron. The introduction of the book was pretty straight forward: neoconservatives have pushed Friedmanite neoliberal policy down the throat of people by using engineered and fake disasters. It began, Klein says, in Chile: Friedman got the US government to pay to send Chilean students to Chicago, who returned to help Pinochet overturn Allende and institute extreme laissez-faire capitalism. This process was repeated in other South American countries, and, eventually, Iraq and the United States government itself. The result is a world with soaring inequality, where we will soon all look like Israel: rich people building a wall around the poor masses to keep them out of our "green zones." Now, I'm a globalist and I read this book specifically because Klein is anti-globalization. She sees American imperialism as something that reaches out and "exploiting profits" while I see a giant redistribution machine (along the lines of Star Slate Codex, it is "the demon that wears its summoner's skin.") But despite this large difference there are a lot of areas that we can agree on: we agree that Friedman is kind of a fraud and that Keynesianism and Neokeynsianism are good economic theories. We agree that the war in Iraq was bungled and that American foreign policy has meant the death and torture of hundreds of thousands across the world. We agree that people who don't believe that governments can do good cannot govern well. But, like many disagreements on the centrist-to-far-left spectrum, there are disagreements about the sort of emphasis that people make... and then there are fallacies that people make. My first disagreement on emphasis is that Klein does not bring up racism or American ethnocentricity. Are we really to believe that Sandy Springs' secession from Atlanta was a part of class warfare, or that New Orleans was left to flood by the government because the rich could drive out? Could it be, I don't know, that the America and the American South in particular just don't care about their black people? Zooming out a little, I think that Klein's framework might be a little bit to overemphasized as a real factual thing throughout the entire tomb despite not being consistently applied: This arrow of causation that flows from "disaster to neoliberalism to crack down" simply doesn't follow in all cases. For example, Naomi uses the Chinese Tienanmen Square event to describe how capitalist policies are in direct response to neoliberalism. This is a really weird example. Firstly, the "shock" in this example would be... Mao's communism? The neoliberalism itself is in China is entirely antithetical to the Friedmanite Chicago School of Econ (I don't think Milton was that fond of currency manipulation). And the protesters themselves? They were against the party, corruption in the government- basically the entire Chinese state of affairs. People protesting against secret police probably care less about inequality than Occupy Wall Street. This lack of facts -this lack of context- is another annoying part of the Shock Doctrine. You aren't told the state of affairs before the shock (unless it is to point out how bad the shock was). You are simply told, "This place was ok, then something bad happened or somebody bad happened to it, and now it is a capitalist hellscape." This context setting is important. It's easy to say "Horrible Event A was in shadowy Organization B's economic interest" but its a lot harder to make that matter. For example, did Russia have an economic interest in retaking Crimea? Sure. Is that why they did it? No, they did it because its an easily defensible base they can use to project power. Then you have this confabulation about what "disaster" means. Disaster can mean (1) an invasion, (2) a coup, (3) a hurricane, (4) an economic meltdown. Basically, anything bad that happens will be used by X to justify a change... Duh? Like, that's basically all of history. Nothing good has ever happened by people just deciding "Let's make the world better." It has always, always, always been people saying "Holy shit this is the worst we have to change it" and "change it" can mean anything from "New Deal" to "overturn the Czar." If you turn history into a chronology of violence to achieve a political aim, then all ideologies have been culpable at one time or another. The biggest and most annoying part of this book, again, is I did not expect a torture story. Klein tries to draw the line that what happened in Chile, in Iraq, and even Katrina is a psychological torture trying to return these regions into a "blank slate". Her descriptions of the first blows in Iraq draw on the same language that she uses to describe Cameron's torture experiments. But she never shows they're morally equivalent. There is a purposefulness to Cameron's psychology. There was a intended goal and and attention to detail. Those goals and attentions to detail explicitly did not exist in the nations that she compares them to. As a conclusive nay against this book: Klein seems to group lots of disparate peoples and ideologies into one. China's movement towards capitalism is nothing like Pinochet's economic illiberalism which was nothing like Yeltsin and Putin's oligarchism which is nothing like Bush's insistence on devolution which is nothing like Israel's securitech economy. Lumping them together they're all alike because they're inherently ok with the existence of markets is like saying that Clinton and Trump are the same. It's an ok thing, but it isn't useful. The sky is blue. What suggestions does Klein bring to the table? How do we fight against the Shock Doctrine? Not many. Don't destroy governments. Allow communities to build and rebuild themselves. That latter fact is actually actionable. The Marshall Plan gave Europe the tools to build itself. Post-2004 tsunami communities that flourished flourished because they were paid. But it can be written shorter, "Don't fuck it up." I don't know how much value there is in that. But how much value is there in the book itself? Its a good popular history. If you divorce the book from the overarching worldview therein, and the conspiracies that it holds, the stories themselves are strong and they stand alone. They're warnings about the limits to trying to govern by proxy and about the damage that can be done when democracy is ignored. If you want to "shock" yourself with American atrocities, this would be a good reminder... but I bet there's a Chomsky book out there that would do it better. |
Saturday, July 30, 2016
Review: The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
How do you go from an online book store ordering books, storing them in your basement, to having one of the highest earnings-per-share in Silicon Valley? You "Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient."
The novel has chapters that look at episodes in Amazon's life. It is not chronological, and often flashbacks in ways that kind of break the narrative. That's why this book gets 4 stars.
But those episodes are good. They tell good stories. For example:
Diapers.com by Quidsi was a really refreshing start up that became really, really good at shipping a few products to expectant mothers and mothers. They sold large packages at $45 a pop. Everybody wanted a piece of it: Amazon, Target, Walmart. They all wanted some of that sweet, sweet mommy-money (and I say this because mommy-money is basically a real thing: you get a mother locked into your store, and you've got her basically locked in for life). Anyways, Walmart approached first, and Quidsi was like, "ok, this is cool, lets shop it around."
And then they got to Amazon. "La la la, lets make a deal... oh. btw" Amazon announced $40 prices for the same things-- AND $30 IF THEY SUBSCRIBED. That is some Red Wedding shit. That's brutal corporate machinations in the quest to "put the customer first". Its just brutal.
This book is good. It is packed with stories, and the philosophy that makes Amazon tick.
The novel has chapters that look at episodes in Amazon's life. It is not chronological, and often flashbacks in ways that kind of break the narrative. That's why this book gets 4 stars.
But those episodes are good. They tell good stories. For example:
Diapers.com by Quidsi was a really refreshing start up that became really, really good at shipping a few products to expectant mothers and mothers. They sold large packages at $45 a pop. Everybody wanted a piece of it: Amazon, Target, Walmart. They all wanted some of that sweet, sweet mommy-money (and I say this because mommy-money is basically a real thing: you get a mother locked into your store, and you've got her basically locked in for life). Anyways, Walmart approached first, and Quidsi was like, "ok, this is cool, lets shop it around."
And then they got to Amazon. "La la la, lets make a deal... oh. btw" Amazon announced $40 prices for the same things-- AND $30 IF THEY SUBSCRIBED. That is some Red Wedding shit. That's brutal corporate machinations in the quest to "put the customer first". Its just brutal.
This book is good. It is packed with stories, and the philosophy that makes Amazon tick.
Saturday, January 16, 2016
Review: Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Superforecasting is, technically, just a long explanation about what the Good Judgement Product found in its forecasting tournaments. Specifically, that it is possible to predict the future better than prediction markets.
The big question that should make you come to the book and that the book answers wonderfully is, "how can I do this too?" It turns out the answer isn't by creating the greatest mathematical models (though that helps) or being super smart (though that helps). the answer, Tetlock explains, is by thinking probablistically, and by attempting to improve yourself after failure, as well as getting feedback. I don't think this is revolutionary. it's common sense... but it isnt celebrated in the culture. Tetlock and Gardner hit on this on their cultural examples: we hate uncertainty, we hate uncertain leaders, and hate being wrong. It's why meteorologists tend to be the most accurate TV personalities, but the most reviled.
The book, hopefully, will make you think about things harder and probably make you more inclined to read 538.com
The big question that should make you come to the book and that the book answers wonderfully is, "how can I do this too?" It turns out the answer isn't by creating the greatest mathematical models (though that helps) or being super smart (though that helps). the answer, Tetlock explains, is by thinking probablistically, and by attempting to improve yourself after failure, as well as getting feedback. I don't think this is revolutionary. it's common sense... but it isnt celebrated in the culture. Tetlock and Gardner hit on this on their cultural examples: we hate uncertainty, we hate uncertain leaders, and hate being wrong. It's why meteorologists tend to be the most accurate TV personalities, but the most reviled.
The book, hopefully, will make you think about things harder and probably make you more inclined to read 538.com
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Review: Group Chat Meme
tl;dr: To endorse the concept that European borders are to blame for developing world conflict is to endorse problematic concepts of nationa...
